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He said "get a will and you're covered". I don't think he was talking about losing a computer to lightning, but getting struck personally while you're walking around.

That said, there are things you can do for that, too... try not to be the tallest object during a thunderstorm (ex, don't be in a boat on the lake, don't be in the middle of a field, and don't hide under the tallest tree). As you point out, there are very few times when burying your head in the sand is the best move.

Android has no API for "take_a_photo_with_permission()", there's just stuff to access the camera. It definitely makes sense why facebook app might need access to the camera: it clearly supports taking photos directly, and that's something users want. I'm not sure about Firefox or Chrome, but maybe flash runs within the brower's security context, so the browser would need permission to access the camera if flash was going to?

I highly doubt facebook, chrome, and firefox are using the camera without our knowledge. That said, the permission system on android could be improved to ensure this doesn't happen. Google has alread said they don't want to do that, though.

Doesn't Open Source predate the free software movement? When Richard Stallman was fighting with that printer which he didn't have a driver for, he was using a Unix machine. Traditionally, Unix has come with the source code but you were restricted with what you could do with it. That sounds like Open Source to me.

Whether a monopoly is illegal isn't decided by how you acquired the monopoly. It's what you do after you achieve monopoly level market share which determines whether your monopoly is legal or illegal. You can be as anticompetitive as you want, but once you dominate any market segment, you have to be careful how you use that dominance.

Really? Because we subscribe to Google Apps and let me tell you, Google Docs is incredible for shared content creation even if it is absolutely horrendous at formatting.

And LibreOffice/OpenOffice are almost as good as MS Office for sharing... put the files on a Samba share and then utilize the trackchanges and commenting systems built into the application.

So our process is often generate the content quickly in Google Docs, then 1 person copy/splats that into LibreOffice and cleans up the formatting (adding company watermarks, properly inserting figures, etc).

While I'm sure to be modded down for asking the hard questions and I doubt anybody would have had the guts to ask him

What the hell is this shit? Your comment reads like you asked why he murdered your wife. You're not publically interogating Salvatore Riina, you're asking Linus about ABIs. That's not a question that takes "guts" to ask. Cut the dramatic bullshit.

I'm an engineer. We have a couple of copies of Matlab on a floating license, but mostly use the Sci lab. All the engineers run Linux, so MS Office isn't an option. Only management and sales have MS Office licenses. We do our documentation (internal and external data sheets, etc) in LaTeX. Other documents show up as LibreOffice.

So even for those of us that use that stuff... it needn't be important.

And prior to the DMCA, your way is exactly how it worked, except the ISP didn't have to pull the content and the rights owner had more difficulty finding the individual who posted the content as the service provider was under no obligation to tell them without a court order. That abuse of the DMCA system is already rampant and congress wants to expand the power to include DNS blocking is madness.